Lighting components such as luminaires are intrinsically very homogeneously distributed in what is known as a luminaire louvre within buildings, have permanent access to the power supply and have a housing that is predestinated to hold additional modules and functionalities.
Modern luminaires use LED-based illuminants that are operated by an electronic operating unit (driver). The driver is customarily used to actuate an LED module within the luminaire. Secondly, the driver is connected to an overall light management system. The driver may moreover have an additional power supply connection for additional communication modules and a communication interface for communication with said power supply connection.
Such a communication module may be a fixed transmitter (beacon) that is received by a mobile terminal and provides local services, such as self-location, for example. In addition, it is also possible for mobile beacons to be used in order to locate these via the communication modules. Thus, it is possible for the location of items within a building to be ascertained, for example. In this context, DE 20 2009 005 690 U1 discloses a locating system for items of equipment in a building, wherein this item of equipment includes at least one location signal transmitter, the location signal transmitter being capable of delivering at least one location signal, and/or includes at least one location signal receiver, the location signal receiver being capable of receiving at least one of these location signals, wherein the location signal transmitter and the location signal receiver interact such that this interaction makes it possible to identify the physical position of the item of equipment in the building.
Moreover, the communication modules may allow the setup of a network by means of reciprocal communication with the respective adjacent communication modules, in order to receive data and forward them to a gateway. Such a gateway may be connected to a server, for example, that collects the data. An identification signal emitted by a mobile beacon may be received by multiple communication modules. As a result, it is possible to attain a higher level of security for the mobile beacon itself and hence also for the item that is equipped with the mobile beacon.
Every beacon is received at an associated signal strength. This information helps to increase the accuracy of location, either by means of trilateration (level measurement, no propagation time measurement) or when using what is known as a fingerprint map representing a map in which previously measured signal strengths are entered which are assigned to the associated location. The communication modules receive the identification signals, which include an explicit identification number, what is known as the UUID (universally unique identifier), and forward them together with the individually received signal strength, serving as location information, to a server via a mesh network. From this, the server may ascertain the history of the whereabouts of the mobile beacons incorporated in the system.
A perturbing effect for this application is that a mesh network has the property of using different paths to send the information to the server. This means. that the received location information may be received in an order that does not necessarily correspond to the order of pickup of the location information. This may cause inaccuracies in the evaluation calculations.